Yahoo Finance My first boss: Anthony Rose, from BBC iPlayer to SeedLegals co-founder
South African-born Anthony Rose has been named by Wired Magazine as "the man who saved the BBC" for his work on the launch of the iPlayer.
The British-based serial tech entrepreneur, 57, has since founded a number of companies, including Beamly and 6Tribes, and is currently the co-founder and CEO of SeedLegals, the world’s first legal automation platform for startup funding. It currently employs over 140 people with revenue of £10m.
Once upon a time I had my own company building hardware electronics, but at some point the question was whether to grow or get a proper job. I was introduced to Kevin Bermeister, who owned the Sega franchise in Australia.
Being creative, he didn’t just want to sell other people’s games — he wanted to start something new. I decided to move on from building electronics in the mid-90s to being chief technical officer (CTO) of Brilliant Digital Entertainment, a Sydney-based real time 3D graphics company.
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It was the first time I had worked with other people but I guess Kevin saw something innovative as I had no experience in software management or managing people. As CTO you are asked to build things and businesses often change their minds on what they want. The first thing I found was that the requirements soon change and this is common for every startup.
The next time the CEO came saying the requirements needed a change, instead of letting it fail and having to rebuild everything, I thought about all the things he had asked me for and what Kevin might ask next. In that way, I could predict and have the answer for a particular requirement. That for me was gamifying as a CTO in a business; instead of being endlessly frustrated, you could have a successful outcome.
I now realise it is a common pattern but founders always have a mission, to change the world and build something. Often the delivery is an anti-climax and they want to keep building stuff. I noticed with Kevin, as soon as we shipped something we could sell, he would come along with the next iteration. I wanted to stop building and start selling the product.
It is one of the things I learnt quite quickly at SeedLegals, that companies which endlessly build things eventually run out of money. Focus on what is the first minimal, viable product that customers can use and then switch gears and go out and sell, rather than forever try and build perfection.
I stayed at Brilliant Digital until 2007 when the BBC hired me and I moved to London to head up the iPlayer. I wanted to be open, invite the ardent critics in, and focus on what the customer wanted. One of the issues then was that the BBC optimised all the wrong things; to reduce streaming costs which meant video quality wasn't good, the moderation team which meant it took days for anything to go live. None of this created a good user experience.
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With every company I work with now, we start and build with what the customer wants and anything else is subsidiary to that. With customer testing, it transformed the iPlayer product in a matter of weeks, from a disastrous first test to a customer-driven development, which is principle to everything.
This all came from my experience with file sharing application Kazaa — which I also worked with alongside Kevin — and its millions of daily users. If you break something you cause huge problems and if you make an improvement you get a huge amount of love. The other thing is to look at social media and see what people are saying about your product.
The challenge for every founder in a company is the question of who is the founder and who is an employee — and what is the difference? The founder is one who wears the weight of the company’s future on their shoulders. You can’t get bored and decide to leave but an employee can. Often there are hard decisions to make and what I saw with Kevin and his business partner, Mark Dyne, with the interplay of trying to IPO the company, was the emotional rollercoaster of it all. The key was how to motivate the team at the same time.
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Kevin and Mark were ‘big picture’ people, hugely influential and had a real vision to change. Kevin has had a stellar career, was an early investor in Skype, and still today remains the visionary over the immediate.
With SeedLegals, we have over 35,000 UK companies on our platform and we see an endless number of startups. With Laurent Laffy, my co-founder at Seedlegals, I am the product person and he is the visionary and together we form and create the business proposition.
My goal now is that I am much more transactional. My own business partners today very much match the characteristics and complement my own personality that I have seen throughout my career.
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